Book Review of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

Possible spoiler alert. Read with caution.

I run a book club, and my book club recently just finished reading the amazing thriller, "A Good Girl's Guide to Murder." It's a murder mystery, but it's one of those where the author does a brilliant job of making the killer's reveal be unexpected. There were enough possibilities of who did it for me to need to keep reading. My guesses of who it was changed throughout the entire story. I also like that it meant something. What I mean by that is even though it was designed for entertainment, for readers to want to keep turning pages, it had important messages and pointed out some flaws in society.

The novel follows Pippa who decides to go on an investigation for her school project. Andie is a girl in her town who has gone missing. Her boyfriend, Sal, was found dead in the woods after, and so the town assumes that he was her killer and killed himself after. Pippa doesn't believe this is true though and goes deeper to find out what really happened. Sal was black, so I believe it's a way to show racism that exists in our society. It's super sad but black men are 6 times as likely to be imprisoned than white men. Racism exists in many different forms, and in this book, it's an entire town blaming an entire murder on someone without any evidence. One of my questions while reading was why Pippa was so motivated to preserve his innocence? She didn't really know him all that well. I read this as her fight against racism in the town. That's my personal take on it.

I also liked Andie's character even though I was only told about her and never saw her in live time. I liked how even though she was the victim, Pippa found out how mean she was. I liked the honesty in discovering who Andie truly was and seeing her as more than a victim. I liked that her true self came out and it was discovered that Andie wasn't perfect, and that she was actually pretty awful to a lot of people. It increased the reliability for me where I trusted the author even more after her honesty.

I also like that Pippa is a woman and I see feminism in this book as well, as she is more daring and brave than a lot of the men. There are plenty of instances where she literally is willing to put her life in danger for her case. I love her curiosity and guts. She works with Ravi, who was the brother of Sal. There are things Ravi didn't want to do, yet Pippa always was going for it. I really adored that in her character. It made me want to start going on my own investigation.

I also loved the structure and format that Holly wrote the novel in. It's written so that most of it isn't narrative, but a journey entry as Pippa writes down all of her suspects. She writes down all the interviews she has and she also writes a suspect list at the end of each entry. She also logs her own thoughts. And she bolds the names she feels are the biggest suspects. It's a great way to organize the book. When I met with my book club, someone said it helped them keep track of where we were in the book. She often reads ahead but she could easily go back and read where we are at by using the entries. It made it easier for her to not spoil anything for us. Plus, it's fun because at the end you can go back and see the progression of the whole investigation. I loved it because it felt more like I wasn't being told the investigation but that I was right there with Pippa. I think it helped characterization of the main character but also helped readers connect with her more as well.

I thought Holly did a good job of differentiating between all the characters. There were so many and I still felt like they all came to life for me. That's hard to do, as characterization for only one character can be hard sometimes. It's so easy to create confusion in thrillers, but I was never confused.

I will admit I wish I saw a little more romance between Pippa and Ravi, though that's just me being the romance fan I am. It was more accurate that they slowly fell for each other over time. It's perfect as it is, it just means I may have to read the next book to see what happens next with them.

I don't want to give spoilers. I did feel like the second twist was the one that I never saw coming. The first one though was a little predictable for me just because I've seen a lot of thriller movies and have been getting into reading the books. I do think it was good that the first twist was less intense because it foreshadowed that there was more coming. I was so thankful there was something else, or else it would've felt like there was something missing. The very end was very intense. I will admit I was only planning on reading so many pages one day and ended up binging the rest of it because I couldn't put it down.

I didn't like what happened with the dog (I'm trying not to spoil anything) just because it felt so horrific in the moment, almost like it was too dark to match the rest of the book if that makes sense.

But I really can't critique this book much. I loved it! I was satisfied by the end and it was well worth the read. I'm excited to give the next two books a go!

If you're a thriller or mystery fan, I highly urge you to give these books a try!